Abstract
For the social insurance industry, Africa is considered to be a market of the future where "the scramble for African custom-ers" has just begun. With a share of more than 80 per cent of all insurance sales, the southern African countries of South Af-rica, Namibia and Botswana dominate the life insurance market. Namibia, though only a small country in respect to its popu-lation size, represents the "new targets" of insurers, where more life premiums than non-life premiums are sold and account-ed for more than US$1 billion of sales in 2021. Life insurance, including funeral coverage that provides for the entire family, has turned out to be a bestseller. Customers appear to have considerable confidence in their insurers and have found a way to merge company requirements, culture-specific preferences, and national inheritance laws. This contribution looks at the backdrop of increased sales and redirected monetary flows and argues that caring for the afterlife by way of formal life in-surance impacts not only informal support networks but also on notions of time and the relations between the living and the dead.
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